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The Clinton Doctrine of American Foreign Policy

By DAVID ROHDE
CBS, via Associated Press

The partisan political theater, of course, was top-notch. Sen. Rand Paul’s declaration that he would have fired Hillary Rodham Clinton; her angry rebuttal of Sen. Ron Johnson’s insistence that the Obama administration misled the American people about the Benghazi attack; Sen. John McCain’s continued outrage at the slapdash security the State Department provided its employees.

Beneath the posturing, though, ran larger questions: what strategy does the United States have to counter the militant groups running rampant across North and West Africa? And what kind of secretary of state has Ms. Clinton been? In her last Congressional hearing in that position, Ms. Clinton expressed exasperation with Washington’s political trench warfare.

“We’ve got to get our act together,” she said.

Ms. Clinton has been a very good but very cautious secretary of state, many analysts say – one who, for the most part, kept her distance from Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine and other seemingly intractable conflicts.

One State Department official, while praising Ms. Clinton’s tenure, nonetheless looked forward to the arrival of Sen. John Kerry, her designated successor: “I came to admire Clinton as secretary of state, her focus on women and innovation in particular,” the official told me. “But am really happy to have someone in the job who does not retain political ambitions.”

In a recent assessment of Clinton’s tenure, Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution argued that she had enjoyed some success, including restoring the United States’ image abroad, but she made no historic breakthroughs, he said.

Mr. O’Hanlon argued that Ms. Clinton’s famed work ethic paid off. She made few mistakes, no major gaffes and did not “needlessly antagonize” friends or enemies. O’Hanlon called Ms. Clinton’s role in the administration’s “pivot to Asia” and tough stance toward China arguably “her greatest and most memorable contribution.”

The problem, as last week’s hearing showed, is that the Middle East and the threat of terrorism continue to dominate American foreign policy. Even as the United States becomes more energy independent, terrorist attacks like the kidnappings in a remote oil facility in Algeria will make headlines and influence markets. And barring a massive shift in American domestic politics, Israel’s security will continue to be viewed as a vital interest of the United States.

Ms. Clinton, to her credit, made forty trips to Europe that helped produce crippling new sanctions on Iran. Last fall, she helped broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. But she failed to personally engage in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

To be fair, the Obama White House may have limited her options. After promising more open debate than occurred under President George W. Bush, the Obama White House tightly controlled the formulation of American foreign policy. Critics have also accused Mr. Obama of being overly cautious in foreign affairs.

With the exception of the Libya intervention and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama was “coolly calculating and reluctant to engage” in his first-term foreign policy, The Economist magazine recently argued.

Mr. Obama, of course, is trying to avoid the over-reach his predecessor displayed in Iraq. He also faces enormous fiscal pressures at home. But there is a risk that the pendulum is swinging too far toward a smug isolationism in Washington.

As Ms. Clinton departs, worrying trends are emerging in the way America engages with the world. The new U.S. weapon of choice is the drone strike – a tactic that carries zero political risk at home but spreads anti-Americanism abroad.

Complex foreign policy problems that threaten American security are increasingly seen as “entanglements” best avoided. And there is a convenient view that there are no “good guys” in the power struggles now unfolding in the post-Arab-Spring Middle East.

The potential lesson of the bruising political battle over Benghazi is simple: Take few risks, turn embassies into bunkers and avoid political firestorms at home. In her testimony, Ms. Clinton passionately argued against that approach.

Declaring Somalia and Colombia success stories, she said the United States could counter militancy in Africa and the Middle East by working with regional organizations and training local security forces. U.S. funding and training of an African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM, Ms. Clinton said, had slowly succeeded in driving back al-Shabaab and other Islamist forces. In Colombia, the government has driven back FARC rebels and narco-traffickers.

There have been setbacks and the efforts in both countries are imperfect. But local security forces trained and funded by the international community slowly gained ground in painstaking efforts over many years.

“What we have to do is recognize that we’re in for a long-term struggle here,” Ms. Clinton said at the hearing. “And that means we’ve got to pay attention to places that historically we have not chosen to or had to.”

During their heated exchange, Mr. McCain criticized Ms. Clinton and the Obama administration for not doing enough to train Libya’s security forces. Secretary Clinton replied that House Republicans had put a hold on the funding the administration requested to train Libyans.

“If this is a priority and we are serious about trying to help this government stand up security forces,” she said, “then we have to work together.”

Ms. Clinton is right. And so is Mr. McCain. Congressional politicking hinders the State Department. And the State Department executed terribly in Benghazi. But Ms. Clinton, who I have criticized in the past, won the day.

“We are in a new reality,” she said, referring to the change sweeping across the Middle East. “We are trying to makes sense of events that nobody had predicted but that we’re going to have to live with.”

Ms. Clinton called for the United States to show “humility” abroad and stop making national security issues “political footballs” at home. She said a Cold War style bipartisan agreement should be reached to launch a long-term American effort to strengthen local security forces and promote democracy across Africa and the post-Arab-Spring Middle East.

“Let’s be smart and learn from what we’ve done in the past,” she said. “Put forth a policy that wouldn’t go lurching from administration to administration but would be a steady one.”

“We have more assets than anyone in the world,” Ms. Clinton added, “but I think we’ve gotten a little bit off track in trying to figure out how best to utilize them.”

A “little bit off track” is a euphemism for partisanship endangering national security. If the U.S. doesn’t get its act together, expect more Benghazis.

The Clinton Doctrine

President Clinton’s decision to use military force against the Serbs was not simply a calculated response to Slobodan Milosevic’s intransigence. A careful reading of recent Administration statements and Pentagon documents shows that the NATO bombing is part of a larger strategic vision.

About the Author

Michael T. Klare
Michael T. Klare, Nation defense correspondent, is professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College….

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That vision has three basic components. The first is an increasingly pessimistic appraisal of the global security environment. “In this last annual threat assessment of the twentieth century,” Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified on February 2, “I must tell you that US citizens and interests are threatened in many arenas and across a wide spectrum of issues.” Those perils range from regional conflict and insurgency to terrorism, criminal violence and ethnic unrest.

The second component is the assumption that as a global power with far-flung economic interests, the United States has a vested interest in maintaining international stability. Because no other power or group of powers can guarantee this stability, the United States must be able to act on its own or in conjunction with its most trusted allies (meaning NATO).

The third component is a conviction that to achieve global stability, the United States must maintain sufficient forces to conduct simultaneous military operations in widely separated areas of the world against multiple adversaries, and it must revise its existing security alliances–most of which, like NATO, are defensive in nature–so that they can better support US global expeditionary operations.

Combined, these three propositions constitute a new strategic template for the US military establishment. This template is evident, for example, in the $112 billion the President wants to add to the Defense Department budget over the next six years, which will be used to procure additional warships, cargo planes, assault vehicles and other equipment intended for “power projection” into distant combat zones.

Less public, but no less significant, is the US effort to convert NATO from a defensive alliance in Western Europe into a regional police force governed by Washington. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright first unveiled this scheme this past December at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels. Claiming that missile-armed “rogue states” pose as great a threat to Europe as the Warsaw Pact once did, Albright called on NATO to extend its operational zone into distant areas and to combat a wide range of emerging threats. “Common sense tells us,” she said, “that it is sometimes better to deal with instability when it is still at arm’s length than to wait until it is at our doorstep.”

Herein lies the essence of what might be termed the Clinton Doctrine–the proposition that the best way to maintain stability in the areas that truly matter to the United States (like Western Europe) is to combat instability in other areas, however insignificant it may seem, before it can intensify and spread. Perhaps the most explicit expression of this doctrine was Clinton’s February 26 speech in San Francisco–an important statement that clearly foreshadowed the decision to bomb Serbia:

It’s easy…to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brushland in the Horn of Africa, or some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River. But the true measure of our interests lies not in how small or distant these places are, or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names. The question we must ask is, what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and spread. We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so [emphasis added].

This is an extraordinary statement; not since the Vietnam era has a US President articulated such an ambitious and far-reaching policy. Moreover, as we have seen in the Balkans, Clinton has every intention of acting on its precepts. His decision to bomb Serbia is consistent with a clearly delineated strategic plan.

There is a growing debate over the wisdom of bombing Serbia. Certainly many people are concerned about the humanitarian dimensions of the Serbian actions in Kosovo. But in the course of this debate it is essential not to lose sight of the larger strategic doctrine behind the bombing. If the newly hatched Clinton Doctrine is not repudiated, the bombing of Yugoslavia may be only the first in a series of recurring overseas interventions–a prospect that should galvanize peace and disarmament groups across America.

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Policy Analysis

Articles & Op-Eds

The Clinton Doctrine

Robert Manning and Patrick Clawson

Wall Street Journal

December 29, 1997

Bill Clinton, the first post Cold War president, may be joining a select Cold War club. Since World War II, several presidents have had foreign policy axioms associated with their names: the Truman Doctrine, which launched containment; the Carter Doctrine, declaring the Persian Gulf a vital interest: the Reagan Doctrine, backing anti-Soviet guerrilla forces. So what’s the Clinton Doctrine? The continued tensions with Iraq and the interminable intervention in Bosnia — highlighted during Mr. Clinton’s pre Christmas visit there — raise the tear that this president’s doctrine may be: We only intervene when there is no vital national security interest, particularly if a domestic special-interest group supports it and the risk of casualties is low.

This doctrine was not in evidence during Mr. Clinton’s first full-scale security challenge in October 1994, when Saddam Hussein moved troops as if to invade Kuwait. Mr. Clinton responded by dispatching overwhelming force. Result: Saddam was put under more restrictions (a “no drive” zone near Kuwait); respect for U.S. resolve and might were reinforced; and the coalition against Saddam was reinvigorated.

Not to be deterred by success, the Clinton administration made that demonstration of force in Iraq the exception that proves the rule. Consider its response to the next two bona fide nation security emergencies it faced: the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis and the current crisis over United Nations inspectors in Iraq. Both cases involved the “major regional contingencies” on which U.S. military planning is based. Yet in each we, Mr. Clinton’s top priority was avoiding use of military force and confrontation, even if that meant accepting significant risks to U.S. interests.

Accepting Ambiguity An uncharitable interpretation would be that Mr. Clinton simply declared victory and unleashed spinmeisters to persuade us it was so. In the case of North Korea, after declaring publicly that Pyongyang cannot be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, the president decided to live with the possibility that it has one or two secret atomic bombs, rather than pressing for a more certain resolution that could have risked armed conflict. In the Iraq case, Mr. Clinton so far has accepted the ambiguity of the dangerous status quo ante, while Saddam gained an opportunity to hide the biological weapons that U.N. inspectors had been closing in on.

It may be argued that in both cases, Mr. Clinton pursued the prudent course, achieving partial fulfillment of U.S. objectives through diplomacy. Pyongyang, after all, agreed to freeze and eventually give up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for various American blandishments. However, the U.S. could have carried out escalating sanctions until North Korea came into compliance with its International Atomic Energy Agency obligations. If Pyongyang responded with military action, it could have done enormous damage, but the result would have been a unified Korea, a dead communist dinosaur and a powerful lesson to other potential proliferators.

Similarly, the administration’s defenders argued that using air and sea power against Iraq this year would not have gotten rid of Saddam or destroyed his weapons of mass destruction. A less generous view is that a serious bombing campaign against military and industrial facilities would have reduced Iraq’s military capacity and made It clear that not cooperating with U.N. inspectors was very costly indeed.

Any way you slice it, these two chapters in Clinton foreign policy stand in sharp contrast with the occasions on which he has intervened militarily, humanitarian crises in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia chief among them. There is no sufficient justification — least none rooted in U.S. national security interests — for any of these undertakings.

True, the Somalia effort was begun by President Bush. But Mr. Clinton changed the mission from humanitarian relief to nation-building, leading to the conflict with Muhammad Farah Aideed’s forces. Haitian migrants are a problem for the U.S. But that’s hardly an argument for a multibillion-dollar intervention that, as U.N. peacekeepers now depart three years later, appears to have made little difference in the country’s endemic violence poverty and dysfunctional governance. Similarly, our Bosnia mission has stopped the mass killings — for now — but there’s no sign of success in nation building. With Mr. Clinton admitting that U.S. troops won’t be withdrawn by their June 1998 deadline, we now appear committed to a perennial troop presence to maintain order, a la Cyprus or Belfast.

Why go into begin with? Bosnia is near to NATO, but there is little evidence of a “domino effect” by which the war in Bosnia would widen to the Balkans, Turkey and beyond. Preserving NATO’s credibility is arguably a vital U.S. interest. However, there is no reason that peacekeeping outside NATO’s area of responsibility is essential to the credibility of NATO as a military alliance. Rather, this appears to be an administration-spun tautology: We say it puts NATO’s credibility on the line, so it must be true.

At bottom, all three cases are instances of social engineering passing for foreign policy. Those tendencies are strong in Mr. Clinton’s foreign policy. After all, this is the administration that gave us “Engagement and Enlargement” as its national strategy. The term “engagement” is admirably intended to convey an embrace of internationalism and rejection of isolationism. But what it has meant in practice has tended to be a triumph of process over substance. How many times — whether meeting with Yasser Arafat or Jiang Zemin — have we heard top officials proclaim the measure of success is whether meetings proceed as scheduled, regardless of results?

By “enlargement” the administration means expanding the community of democratic states. But the U.S. role in promoting democracy, while important, is limited. Furthermore, it is not clear how important democracy is for national security strategy. And Fareed Zakaria’s recent article in Foreign Affairs makes the crucial point that some democracies — e.g., Peru and Iran — are hardly paragons in respecting liberty. In sum, Engagement and Enlargement provides little practical guidance for foreign-policy decision making let alone military strategy.

The emphasis on Engagement and Enlargement does, however, reflect a view of the world that the administration came in with, though after the Somalia fiasco it was sublimated. Roughly put, it is a belief that the old ways of statecraft, the idea of geopolitics, are passe. Instead, it’s all about geoeconomics. Ideas like “balance of power” must give way to the concept of “cooperative security,” which emphasizes defusing threats by drawing potentially hostile states into a network of cooperation among a broad group of nations. The essential difference is that the old view pictured nations as at times having decidedly different interests, while the Clinton perspective implicitly assumes common interests if only issues are understood properly — all states are said to benefit from cooperating on economic liberalization and conflict resolution.

In this view, all we need to manage conflict among states is to foster endless “dialogue.” There is an unspoken sense that war among modern states is obsolete in this age of globalized economies. Violence is interpreted as social disorder by (war) criminals, rather than as the methodical pursuit of power by those whose interests are opposed to ours. There is pressure to convert the military into an instrument for police operations on a large scale, intervening where gangs get out of hand. And it is taken for granted that the U.S. position is the only just one, rejected only by the confused or the shortsighted who put temporary commercial interest ahead of humanity’s greater good.

This world view reflects a discomfort with the concept of power and the reality of wielding it. The Clintonites put their trust in a “cooperative security” framework that makes some sense in the context of Western Europe. But notwithstanding Europe’s recent harmony, the past 3,000 years of history suggests that greed, ambition, rivalry — the ingredients for conflict — unfortunately remain intact. Indeed, across rather large amounts of real estate from Southwest to Northeast Asia, the potential for old-style conflict — this time with weapons of mass destruction — is very real. At the end of a century during which human destructiveness has increased exponentially with each technological advance, it seems folly to believe that the dark side of human nature has been expunged from the soul of man.

But Mr. Clinton’s foreign policy seems to operate in a sunnier world, where every disagreement can be ended with a deal. This has produced some notable achievements in the area of economics — principally Nafta and GATT — and arms control, where Mr. Clinton has hewed to an inherited policy. But this approach hasn’t worked well in traditional political conflicts. Even the fabled “Middle East peace process” has become shaky.

To be sure, geoeconomics is of great importance in the new era we are entering. But military capabilities and old-fashioned balance-of-power politics still matter. For instance, Moscow is not talking NATO expansion lying down, but seeking to develop its own counterbalance, which is why Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov intervened in Iraq, and why Moscow has gotten so chummy with Beijing. Even in the case of France, there is more than mere resentment behind Paris’s behavior towards Iraq and Iran.

There is a cost to building a foreign policy on hopes of beneficence rather than on rock-solid shared interests. First, there is a growing resentment among many nations of American “arrogance, ” a view fostered by the administration’s moralistic tone and its seeming refusal to concede that different nations may have different interests. Then, there is cynicism when the U.S. proclaims a universal mission of supporting democracy and human rights — “enlargement” — but has no idea of how to achieve these fine goals in a difficult case like Somalia, Haiti or Bosnia.

Fading Perception Worst, however, is the fading perception among real or potential adversaries that we have clearly defined our vital interests, and that we are willing and able to defend them with military force. The corrosive effects could be substantial, especially if the U.S. military continues its transformation from an institution focused on killing people and destroying things toward an agency mainly for peacekeeping and policing. Over time, our friends and allies may become unsure whether our security umbrella is still reliable. The irony is that, by its pursuit of the chimera of “collective security” — multilateral institutions that solve the problems among their members — the Clinton administration will weaken the networks of “collective defense” we have so carefully built, whether formal alliances like NATO or the loose coalition that fought the Gulf War.

Of course, not all the fault is the administration’s. Unburdened by the end of the Cold War, foreign policy has ceased to be a matter of great day-to-day concern by the public. Congress’s behavior sometimes gives a sense of frivolous power rather than global stewardship — as evidenced in the final hours of the legislative session last month when lawmakers deleted U.N. funds and the U.S. share of the International Monetary Fund in a fit of pique over birth-control policy. Moreover, there is an impulse among many legislators to impose unilateral sanctions as the first line of response to any development in the world that offends American sensibilities, rather than only in cases vital to U.S. security.

But in the end, foreign policy is the president’s responsibility. One hopes that episodes like the still-unfolding Iraq crisis reflect less an operational tenet than occasional tendencies. Saddam’s defiance offers the president an opportunity to demonstrate that force is a credible option when vital U.S. interests are at stake. If he fails to do so, there is a real possibility that American guarantees will be discounted by adversaries and gradually replaced by, hedging strategies among friends and allies.

Robert Manning is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Patrick Clawson is director of research at the Washington Institute.

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Clinton Doctrine

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The Clinton Doctrine is not a clear statement in the way that many other United States Presidential doctrines were. However, in a February 26, 1999, speech, President Bill Clinton said the following, which was generally considered to summarize the Clinton Doctrine[1]:

It’s easy … to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brushland in the Horn of Africa, or some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River. But the true measure of our interests lies not in how small or distant these places are, or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names. The question we must ask is, what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and spread. We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so.

Clinton later made statements that augmented the doctrine of interventionism:

“Genocide is in and of itself a national interest where we should act” and “we can say to the people of the world, whether you live in Africa, or Central Europe, or any other place, if somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion, and it’s within our power to stop it, we will stop it.”

The Clinton Doctrine was used to justify the American involvement in the Yugoslav Wars. President Clinton was criticized for not intervening to stop the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Other observers viewed Operation Gothic Serpent in Somalia as a mistake.

Contents

National Security Strategy

In Clinton’s final National Security Strategy, this doctrine was clarified by differentiating between national interests and humanitarian interests.[2] National interests were described as those which:

do not affect our national survival, but … do affect our national well-being and the character of the world in which we live. Important national interests include, for example, regions in which we have a sizable economic stake or commitments to allies, protecting the global environment from severe harm, and crises with a potential to generate substantial and highly destabilizing refugee flows.

Bosnia and Kosovo were provided as examples of such interests and stakes. In contrast, humanitarian interests were described as those which forced the nation to act:[3]

because our values demand it Examples include responding to natural and manmade disasters; promoting human rights and seeking to halt gross violations of those rights; supporting democratization, adherence to the rule of law and civilian control of the military; assisting humanitarian demining; and promoting sustainable development and environmental protection.

See also

References

  1. ^ Michael T. Klare (1999-04-19). “The Clinton Doctrine”. The Nation. Retrieved 2008-09-16.[dead link]
  2. ^ Clinton, William J. (December 2000). ‘ A National Security Strategy For A New Century. The White House.
  3. ^ Clinton, William J. (December 2000). ‘ A National Security Strategy For A New Century. The White House.

External links

Further reading

  • Meiertöns, Heiko: The Doctrines of US Security Policy – An Evaluation under International Law, Cambridge University Press (2010), ISBN 978-0-521-76648-7.
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